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Showing posts with the label retirement homes

Retirement homes: What will it mean if more hosptial patients end up in them?

A Toronto Star story last month provides some useful information on for-profit retirement homes. These homes now take care of patients that, until recent years, were taken care of in hospitals. With hospital cutbacks, more hospital patients will be forced into them.  Here is part of what the Star reported : • The Ontario coroner's office is investigating the suspicious deaths of three elderly residents of a controversial west Toronto retirement home. • The coroner's probe comes after a Star investigation detailed allegations that residents Edith Farrell, 80, and Danny Henderson, 74, died in hospital earlier this year after suffering severe malnutrition at In Touch Retirement Living.  After the story ran, the family of a third resident, 83-year-old Nellie Dineno, came forward with allegations that she, too, had serious health problems that went untreated before her death in late July. • Critics say the government will allow the privately operated retirement homes to accep

For-profit retirement homes not a solution to hospital overcrowding

As  noted in a blog earlier this week (on a recommendation to start funding retirement homes), some hospitals started to transfer their hospital patients to retirement homes a couple of years ago as a response to hospital overcrowding. The Queensway Carleton Hospital in Ottawa was an early adopter of this trick, shipping patients out of the hospital and into a for-profit retirement home. Here’s what happened, with dire consequences for one senior. Between May 2008 and December 2009, when the trial run ended, Queensway Carleton patients were discharged to a retirement home in the city's southwest. Over 19 months, some $2 million in public funding went to the retirement home to pay for 30 beds and the associated staff to provide care. The money came from the Queensway Carleton and the Champlain Local Health Integration Network (LHIN), Eastern Ontario's health authority. A 92-year-old Ottawa woman was transferred from the Queensway Carleton Hospital to the privately run ret

Fund retirement homes and drive up health care privatization

The push to privatize hospital services (and increase the privatization of long term care) took another step in the Ottawa area this week. This time through a proposal for the government to fund retirement homes, facilities which are overwhelming private and  for-profit.  To date, retirement homes have not been funded by government (although recently hospitals have taken to sending patients to them, sometimes with disastrous results). This proposal comes as the provincial government cuts hospital beds, cuts home care services, and slows to a trickle the creation of new long term care beds. dallan@cupe.ca